Post on 03-Feb-2022
transcript
Hybrid CoE
RESE
ARCH
AN
D A
NAL
YSIS
Ambiguity in hybrid warfare
ANDREW MUMFORD
Hybrid CoE Strategic Analysis / 24
SEPTEMBER 2020
Hybrid CoE Strategic Analysis is typically a short paper written by academic and research community experts. Strategic Analyses are based on long-term research experience, or on current or completed research projects. The idea behind the Strategic Analysis papers is to enhance understanding of different phenomena in the realm of hybrid threats. They do not present direct recommendations but aim to explain processes and identify gaps in knowledge and understanding, as well as highlight trends and future challenges. Each Strategic Analysis paper includes a literature list for further reading. Topics are related to Hybrid CoE’s work in all of its main functions: training and exercises, communities of interest (hybrid influencing; strategy and defence; and vulnerabilities and resilience) as well as research and analysis.
The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats tel. +358 400 253800 www.hybridcoe.fi
ISBN 978-952-7282-66-3ISSN 2670-2282
September 2020
Hybrid CoE is an international hub for practitioners and experts, building participating states’ and institutions’ capabilities and enhancing EU-NATO cooperation in countering hybrid threats located in Helsinki, Finland
The responsibility for the views expressed ultimately rests with the authors.
3
This analysis represents an attempt to redirect
the discussion on ambiguity in modern hybrid
warfare, and to stake out its own independent con-
ceptual space, through an assessment of its role in
the prosecution of hybrid warfare. The term hybrid warfare is used in this paper to denote a particu-lar sub-set of activities that can come under the umbrella term ‘hybrid threats’, which includes the strategic application of the use of (ambiguous) force to gain territory or attain another strategic goal. Hybrid warfare, unlike other types of hybrid
activities such as interference and influence opera-
tions, is constitutive of visible acts of coercion that
combine overt and covert military force in conjunc-
tion with political disruption. Actors responsible for
hybrid warfare do not require deniability for their
actions precisely because responsibility for the use
of force is disconnected from the ambiguous way
in which it is applied. The key aim of ambiguity is not necessarily to hide the true actor behind the activity, but ultimately to stymie a legitimate response.
For example, a little thought experiment could
proceed from the contention that the Russian
annexation of Crimea did not take place. This is
not to say that the Russian military intervention
in Ukraine did not occur in 2014. Nor should it be
regarded, in academic jargon, as a post-modernist
claim (such as that made by Jean Baudrillard, who
argued that the Gulf War did not happen nearly
thirty years ago because its outcome had, he
claimed, been pre-ordained before the war even
began). Instead, it is an acknowledgment of the
centrality of ambiguity to the conduct of hybrid
warfare and the deliberate cloud of uncertainty,
in regard to the actors and actions involved, that
hung over the Crimea conflict – not to mention
the ability of Russia to act just below the threshold
of legitimate retaliation. The Kremlin acted as if the
annexation had not occurred on its orders, and the
West was unable to respond with force of its own.
This analysis argues that the tactical application of ambiguous force has been superseded by stra-tegic-level hybrid warfare, given the heightened acknowledgement of risk in modern warfare and a shift in the global power balance. Although
acknowledging that hybrid warfare as a Western
concept is not new, it has now attained a level of
strategic usage never before seen amongst a set of
actors – namely regional ‘revisionist powers’ – aim-
ing to turn modest military capabilities into regional
change whilst remaining below a threshold of
conventional response.
Ambiguity is an integral component of hybrid warfare – and therefore also of the strategic landscape of contemporary conflict – yet it remains an elusive concept that has received little systematic scholarly attention. There are
large or growing pools of Western literature on
related concepts, such as deterrence, secrecy, and
covert action. But there is surprisingly little on the
attendant concept of ambiguity, which has yet to be
adequately separated from descriptions of those
activities just listed.
The concept of ambiguity in Western strategic
studies has historically been located in the litera-
ture on nuclear strategy, where it has been asso-
ciated with the notion of deterrence. In his study
of British nuclear strategy in the decades after the
Second World War, John Baylis identified two dis-
tinct schools of thought on the issue. He differen-
tiated between those strategists advocating ‘delib-
erate ambiguity’, whereby nuclear deterrence is
Ambiguity in hybrid warfare
“Ambiguity is an integral component of hybrid warfare, yet it remains an elusive concept. Understanding it allows us to explain why the tactical application of ambiguous force has been superseded by strategic-level hybrid warfare. The key aim of ambiguity is not necessarily to hide the true actor behind the activity, but ultimately to stymie a legitimate response.” – writes Andrew Mumford from the University of Nottingham.
4
enhanced by the ‘certainty of uncertainty’ regard-
ing the possible use of nuclear weapons, and ‘unin-
tentional ambiguity’ in which uncertainty is created
inadvertently through strategic discord arising
from bureaucratic politics or the restraints of the
international system. Hybrid warfare rests firmly on what Baylis labelled as ‘deliberate ambiguity’, because its adoption as a strategic tool by states such as Russia and China is evidence that ambig-uous uses of force are no longer the product of uncertainties about how to attain objectives, but the result of calculated decision-making. To this
extent, the making of a hybrid war strategy explic-
itly creates the conditions for ambiguity because
of the way in which such a strategy is tasked with
harnessing ambiguous ways to use force below the
threshold of legitimate response, embedding it
within a combination of overt and covert military
means, and applying it to the political ends of the
strategy. As later sections of this paper go on to
discuss, hybrid warfare creates ambiguity not nec-
essarily to mask the identity of the actors involved,
but to deter the possibility of conventional retalia-
tory action.
Calculated ambiguity
After the Gulf War ended in 1991, the Secretary
of State during the conflict, James Baker, acknowl-
edged that the Bush administration’s deliberate
refusal to clarify whether it would use nuclear
weapons to defeat the regime of Saddam Hussein
was an act of what he labelled as ‘calculated ambi-
guity’. They left the process deliberately vague to
keep opponents guessing and forced them to check
their own behaviour. To re-appropriate Baker’s phrase, modern acts of hybrid warfare rest firmly on a strategy of calculated ambiguity – an ambi-guity of origin, intent and responsive measures. The Gulf War that Baker helped win was the same
war that Baudrillard provocatively insisted had not
happened because it had been ‘won in advance’ by
American superiority. Of the Gulf conflict, Baudril-
lard observed that: ‘No accidents occurred in this
war, everything unfolded according to program-
matic order… Nothing occurred which would have
metamorphosed events into a duel.’ He could very
well have been describing events in Crimea in
2014, which included the subversive application of
a combination of operations using proxies, conven-
tional military interventions, and cyber-attacks to
coercively dissuade retaliation. It is such calculated
ambiguity that guarantees the outcome of such
‘non-wars’ (as Baudrillard labelled the Gulf War)
that we call hybrid wars today. They are ‘non-wars’
in the sense that conventional force is lacking,
traditional modes of retaliation are muted, thresh-
olds of response are blurred, and the kinetic use
of force between two opposing military powers is
circumvented. In short, hybrid wars often do not
look like wars at all. It is the implausible deniabil-ity of protagonists claiming events are not being orchestrated by themselves that lends hybrid warfare such a surrealistic quality. They treat
knowledge about the conflict and accusations of
responsibility as fundamentally politically-charged.
Interpretations of the conflict are therefore
treated as normative – and the ambiguous applica-
tion of force gives them the political cover to do so.
Ambiguity and ‘plausible deniability’
States often resort to perpetrating hybrid war-
fare because they feel the seductive strategic pull
of wrapping themselves in a cloak of invisibility
that the ambiguous use of force alluringly offers.
However, if significant legal or forensic evidence
emerges linking a state to a particular attack (as
happened during revelations about responsibility
for the Stuxnet cyber attack on Iran’s main nuclear
facility in 2012), then the cloak of invisibility soon
reveals itself to be the Emperor’s new clothes.
The waging of hybrid warfare does not guaran-tee perpetual deniability for the perpetrators. An appreciation of the implausible deniability
surrounding acts of hybrid warfare is important
because ambiguous use of force, like that seen in
Crimea, is an open secret that appeals to political
actors in the international system who want to
boost hard power credentials below the thresh-
old of legitimate response. Hybrid warfare does not, and need not, assume a shroud of secrecy in order to be successful. Implausible deniability is not an unintended consequence. It can be a deliberate powerplay aimed at communicating a message whilst utilizing enough ambiguity of
5
action to avoid retaliation or escalation. Although
the West did not buy the Russian pretence of
no control over events on the ground in Crimea,
Moscow’s efforts to project an aggressive posture
to hinder Western escalation certainly worked.
Implausible deniability is the manifestation of ambiguity in the prosecution of hybrid warfare.
Hybridity and the ‘fog of war’
The father of modern strategic thought, Carl von
Clausewitz, alludes in his seminal treatise On War
to what others have subsequently labelled ‘the fog
of war’ to describe the absence of information a
commander has across a multitude of levels, from
the tactical to the grand strategic. Building an intel-
ligence picture of an enemy’s intent, force struc-
ture, weapon capabilities and so forth remains a
crucial part of any strategy. Hybrid warfare repre-sents the foggiest form of war given the deliber-ate obfuscations that occur in hiding the identity of the perpetrator state. Not knowing exactly who
the ‘enemy’ is, presents the most fundamental of
challenges to strategic formulation. To paraphrase
General Sherman during the American Civil War,
war waged in a hybrid manner puts the opponents
on the horns of a dilemma: over-reaction looks
pre-emptive and disproportionate if clear
responsibility for an attack has not been estab-
lished; but the lack of a response leaves a state
open to death by a thousand cuts. This is the pre-
carious tightrope that policymakers must tread
when determining how to respond to the use of
hybrid warfare by other states given the pervasive
ambiguity with which hybrid warfare is waged.
It is also worth considering how the centrality
of ambiguity to hybrid warfare circumvents what
Thomas Schelling called ‘the art of commitment’
in military strategy. By Schelling’s own admission,
most military commitments ‘are ultimately ambig-
uous in detail’, either deliberately so or ‘because
of the plain impossibility of defining them in exact
detail’. Such constructed ambiguity leads to what
he famously labelled ‘salami tactics’, whereby rules
and norms are gradually sliced away, avoiding any
major transgression but shifting the boundaries
of expected behaviour on a piecemeal basis to
avoid retaliation. Ambiguity is therefore the curtain to mask the tactics of norm erosion in the international arena. This is the strategic envi-
ronment that democratic states or the EU and
NATO member states find themselves operating in.
The challenge for all is to find more clarity amidst
the ambiguity.
Author
Andrew Mumford is, as of August 2020, Professor of War Studies at the University of Nottingham,
where he is Deputy Head of the School of Politics and International Relations. He is a member of
the Hybrid CoE expert pool on security and has consulted the UK Ministry of Defence and NATO on
issues relating to hybrid warfare. His latest book, The West’s War Against ISIS, will be published in 2021.
He is the editor of the new book series ‘Studies in Contemporary Warfare’ by IB Tauris. His previous
books include Counter-Insurgency Warfare and the Anglo-American Alliance (2018), Proxy Warfare (2013),
and The Counter-Insurgency Myth (2011).
6
Literature
Arkin, William M. 1996. ‘Calculated ambiguity: nuclear weapons and the Gulf War’. The Washington Quarterly, 19:4, 2–18.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. The Gulf War did not take place. Sydney: Power Publications.
Baylis, John. 1995. Ambiguity and deterrence: British nuclear strategy, 1945–1964. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Brands, Hal. 2016. ‘Paradoxes of the gray zone’. Foreign Policy Research Institute e-notes,
https://www.fpri.org/article/2016/02/paradoxes-gray-zone/.
Carson, Austin. 2016. ‘Facing off and saving face: covert intervention and escalation management in the
Korean War’. International Organization, 70:1, 103–131.
Charap, Samuel. 2015. ‘The ghost of hybrid war’. Survival, 57:6, 51–58.
Clausewitz, Carl von. 1993. transl Michael Howard and Peter Paret, On war. New York: Everyman Library.
Cormac, Rory. 2018. Disrupt and deny: spies, special forces, and the secret pursuit of British foreign policy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cormac, Rory, and Richard J. Aldrich. 2018. ‘Grey is the new black: covert action and implausible deniability’.
International Affairs, 94:3, 477–494.
Downes, Alexander B., and Mary Lauren Lilley. 2010. ‘Overt peace, covert war? Covert intervention
and the democratic peace’. Security Studies, 19:2, 266–306.
Farwell, James P., and Rafal Rohozinski. 2011. ‘Stuxnet and the future of cyber war’. Survival, 53:1, 23–40.
Freedman, Lawrence. 2004. Deterrence. Cambridge: Polity.
Gibbs, David N. 1995. ‘Secrecy and international relations’. Journal of Peace Research, 32:2, 213–28.
Jervis, Robert. 1983. ‘Deterrence and perception’. International Security, 7:3, 3–30.
Morgan, Patrick M. 2003. Deterrence now. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Murray, Williamson and Mark Grimsely. 1994. ‘Introduction: on strategy’. In Williamson Murray,
MacGregor Knox and Alvin Bernstein (eds), The making of strategy: rulers, states and war. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Poznansky, Michael. 2015. ‘Stasis or decay? Reconciling covert war and the democratic peace’. International Studies Quarterly, 59:4, 815–826.
Poznansky, Michael and Evan Perkoski. 2018. ‘Rethinking Secrecy in Cyberspace: The Politics of Voluntary
Attribution’. Journal of Global Security Studies, 3:4, 402–416.
Sagar, Rahul. 2013. Secrets and leaks: the dilemma of state secrecy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press.
Schelling, Thomas C. 2008 [1966]. Arms and influence. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
7
Hybrid CoE